Omar Cruz Tome. Courtesy Agrarian Platform
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This Wednesday at 7:01 p.m., the fateful WhatsApp message arrived: “He is dead.” Since the first in which Yoni Rivas was warned by the Aguán Valley Agricultural Platform that Omar Cruz Tomé, President of the Los Laureles Farmers’ Cooperative, in his home in Tocoa, Colón, had been shot at least 12 times just eight minutes had passed , in the north of the country. Cruz, 46, is the third social leader to be murdered in Honduras this year, while Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla were the year’s first victims worldwide.
“These murders are meant to scare us,” Rivas said over the phone hours after the activist’s funeral. Despite the threats he received in January 2022 and being under the national protection mechanism, he never had a security system. They also murdered his father-in-law, Andy Martínez, in the attack.
Cruz’s colleagues point directly to the Dinant company as the backers of the murder. On January 11, the activist denounced Miguel Mauricio, the head of this Honduran agricultural company, to prosecutors as an “actor and accomplice” of an armed criminal structure called Los Cachos, according to a public letter to the presidency. , published by the human rights company Estudios para la Dignidad.
However, the company has denied being linked to any armed groups. “When there are elements linking a person to the commission of a crime, Dinant will not hesitate to work with the authorities, making complaints and demanding justice, as we have done for years against theft and the violence against farmers, authorities and Workers are doing in Aguán,” says one of their communiqués. However, after the murder of Cruz, there was still no explanation. With him there have already been 160 violent deaths among residents of Aguán since 2010.
Rivas had seen Cruz that same morning at a meeting between several cooperatives that make up the Aguán Valley Agrarian Platform, an organization that has been campaigning for land reclamation by farmers for more than 25 years. “We shared some reports that we were preparing and talked about the risk situation in the region,” he explains. The comrade, who still can’t conjugate the past tense verbs when referring to Cruz, is tireless: “We wanted to prepare… We’re going to prepare an advocacy tour on the lack of justice in our area. And how agribusiness wants to get us out of the way,” he says. The national police have not yet released any details about the violent death of the human rights defender.
According to Rivas, the threats against his partner were “frequent”. “He was told by the neighbors that several men were taking pictures as he entered and exited his house,” he explains. “It’s happened to all of us. They came to tell me what day they wanted to kill me so I wouldn’t go to my house to sleep.” On October 27, Agrarian Platform denounced the existence of a plan by agro-industrial companies in the region to assassinate the main leaders of Aguán. “We knew this could happen,” he says.
Los Laureles is one of 84 agricultural cooperatives originally formed as part of Honduras land reform. He was the owner of more than 600 hectares of land. According to the organization, they were withdrawn from some Dinant farmers. The unit Cruz headed was one of the best coordinated and one of the most vulnerable. The leader, along with 17 other activists, had been sued by that company for “grave usurpation” of the country, although months later he was acquitted.
“This killing aims to crush the peasant struggle in the Aguán Valley, where the agro-industrialists illegally own the best lands in this country,” says Víctor Fernández, a fellow at human rights law firm Studies for Dignity. who carry the legal and criminal representation of the agricultural platform and also of the Cooperativa de los Laureles. “It implies a qualitative increase in the systematic violence of these groups in alliance with armed groups and with the state supporting their dispossession.” Fernández is blunt: “This was a preventable death, the state was aware of the risk it was taking. And since it’s preventable, it’s responsible. It is a duty to investigate the systematic violence in this sector”.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Oacnudh) condemned the events on Thursday and called on the State of Honduras to “intervene in a timely, appropriate, comprehensive and respectful of human rights to protect the population, particularly human rights defenders of the.” general violence in the Aguán area.”
This killing comes just 11 days after another brutal murder of two Honduran leaders. On January 7, Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla, defenders of the rivers of the Carlos Escaleras National Park, were murdered in Guapinol. She and about thirty activists had spent five years denouncing the contamination of the area’s open pit mines, which they say is causing allergic reactions and community unease.
The three are faces of a trend that is unstoppable and that holds Latin America and the Caribbean as the deadliest region for human rights defenders. A trend that is breaking thousands of families and underscoring the idea that protecting territory will cost your life. Cruz’s companions assure that at least their cause will not be orphaned. “We will continue to defend what is ours,” says Rivas.